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Ginger Pudding
1/3 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 1 egg 2 1/4 cups flour 3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons ginger 1 cup milk Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and egg well beaten; mix and sift dry ingredients; add alternately with milk to first mixture. Turn into buttered mould, cover, and steam two hours; serve with Vanilla Sauce.
A plain steamed batter pudding leaning on ground ginger rather than molasses. The method is straightforward creaming, but the steaming setup and the mould size are left unstated.
- Mould sizeThe batter comes to roughly 4 1/2 cups before steaming and will rise. Use a 1.5- to 2-quart covered pudding mould or a heatproof bowl, buttered and filled no more than two-thirds full.
- How to steamSet the covered mould on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer with the lid on. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pot never runs dry.
- Cover it properlyIf the mould has no clamped lid, tie on a double sheet of buttered parchment or foil with string, pleated across the top to allow rise. Condensation dripping in is what turns steamed puddings soggy.
- Baking powder quantityThree and a half teaspoons to 2 1/4 cups flour is high by modern standards, which typically call for about a teaspoon per cup of flour. With today's double-acting powder, 3 teaspoons is ample and leaves less aftertaste.
- GingerTwo teaspoons of ground ginger is the intent here, not fresh. Ground ginger loses punch quickly, so use a jar opened within the year or the pudding will taste only of flour and butter.
- Two hours is rightUnlike many old timings, this one is not inflated. A dense batter in a covered mould genuinely needs about two hours; test with a skewer at 1 3/4 hours and it should come out clean.
- UnmouldingLet it stand 10 minutes off the heat before turning out, or the outer crumb tears. Serve hot.
- Vanilla SauceThe book intends its own pouring sauce, a thin cornstarch or egg custard sauce flavoured with vanilla. Any warm vanilla custard sauce or thin crème anglaise stands in.
- YieldSix to eight servings.
Steamed puddings dominated the hot-pudding chapter of American and British cookbooks well into the twentieth century, and for a practical reason: a mould set over simmering water needed no reliable oven, only a covered pot and a steady fire, which is exactly what a coal or wood range provided best. This one belongs to the plainer end of the family, a creamed butter cake batter that happens to be steamed rather than baked, and its seasoning comes entirely from ground ginger rather than the molasses and mixed spice of a gingerbread. Ginger was among the cheaper and more durable of the imported spices in a Western kitchen, which may be part of why it turns up so freely in everyday puddings and biscuits while nutmeg and mace were used by the pinch. A sweet pouring sauce was the usual accompaniment to a plain steamed batter pudding.